Thanks so much Ange and All. I’m super stoked about this. It’s a complete surprise. Nicest thing I’ve ever received (maybe apart from my first car from my late great Dad a long long time ago when I was a teenager). No, I actually don’t have all of the CF.com products and I’m really looking forward to absorbing it. This is a gift that truly keeps on keeping on. I remember travelling to Zurich quite a few years and catching up with Charlie for dinner and/or coffee. He would answer my coaching-related questions for which I always shouted the bill. I’m pretty sure he would have allowed me to play Q&A anyway but self-employed track coaches - even those with Olympic medallists in the squad - aren’t exactly flush and neither was Charlie in those days. I’m talking 1985 onwards. But to the point: Charlie was always gracious and trusting enough to permit me to tape record our entire conversation on various cassettes. And I found that even a year or two later, after many, many replays, l still learned something new by listening to Charlie. As those who knew him will testify, he was no one’s fool and he didn’t easily tolerate fools (but made an exception for me). So he told everything the way it is in his own form of coach-speak and if you didn’t understand - or even if you thought you did - you’d have to play the tape back time and time again. Sometimes it took me to grow as a coach through experience and further reading and discussion at the feet of a master (none anywhere near as great as Charlie) before you could understand what he told you years earlier. It was sometimes like a flash light in the face. Geez I miss him, he was a kind of genius. Thankfully Charlie and Ange conspired to educate the world and lift the veil from the eyes of young coaches and athletes who had been fed on bullshit for generations.
Now one more thing…especially for those who never got to know the great man and who these days have the luxury of eavesdropping into his forum - this forum - without even becoming a member: It is time to become a member, time to contribute, time to take the simple step of signing on.
Every day I see 80 or so folks trawling the forum sub sections and rarely more than a handful of you are members.
If you feel you have learned anything from the discussions on this board, then it behoves you to sign on and add your own thoughts, post your own findings even if they are published elsewhere in newspapers (online) in your own country or on other coaching boards of record. C’mon you “visitors” it’s time to step up and be counted.
thanks
Kitkat